The Mysterious Affair at Castaway House (44 page)

I heard men talking in the hallway, voices I did not recognize. Nobody came to get me. Sickly yellow afternoon light filtered through the windowpanes. It seemed disrespectful, somehow, to switch on the electric lamp. The rain began pattering again. Summer was over. Alec was … He was … but I would not think of it.

I was finally called into the dining room a couple of hours later. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting, sir,’ said the police
man at the table, who’d introduced himself as Dawes. ‘Thought we’d do the servants first. Hope you don’t mind.’

‘Not at all,’ I said faintly, sitting opposite him.

He asked me a few basic questions – my name, my age, what my purpose was in the house – and then pushed an item resting on a white handkerchief over to me. ‘Can I ask if you recognize this, sir?’

I stood up to view it and saw a wristwatch face, smashed to pieces and reassembled as much as possible. I felt queasy. ‘Is it Alec’s?’

‘It appears to be. So you don’t recognize it?’

I sighed. ‘Couldn’t say, I’m afraid.’ I sat down again, light-headed. My chest was tighter now than it had been for days, weeks. I coughed. ‘Was it on the cliff ?’

‘On the rocks by the water’s edge. I take it you know about the umbrella?’ When I nodded, he added, ‘We found bloodstains on the spokes, protected from the rain.’

I thought I might be sick. ‘Surely …’ I began. ‘Is there a chance …?’

‘I’m sorry. The boat’s been out all day, and they’ve found nothing.’ He shot me a look. He was only a few years older than me – the same age as Alec, perhaps. ‘We should prepare ourselves for the worst.’

Oh, God
, I found myself thinking,
please let it have been an accident
. He slipped and fell; it was a terrible night. I could not bear the thought that he might have done this to himself, alone.

‘I’m sorry to have to ask you this, Mr Carver, but how has Mr Bray seemed to you recently? Has he been in good spirits or … or not?’

‘He was …’ I looked at the table. ‘He had some financial problems … I mean, that’s not a secret … and … and he’s been drinking quite a lot recently. But really, I can’t believe he would … it must have been an accident, mustn’t it?’

‘That’s what we’re attempting to find out, sir.’ He consulted his notes. ‘Now, Mr Scone says he came across Mr Bray in the hall last night at quarter past one. Did you see him after that time?’

I shook my head. ‘The last time I saw him, he was asleep in the garden. There’s a sort of sheltered part out there. He was on one of the benches.’

‘And that would have been at …?’

I thought. ‘Perhaps nine o’clock?’

He scribbled a note. I wanted to curl up in a ball and hug my misery inwards. Instead, I had to answer more questions, about yesterday’s party, about what time I had gone to bed, about whom I’d seen and whom I’d talked to.

‘Thank you, sir. Just one last thing.’ He frowned at his page. ‘Now, you say the last time you saw him was at about nine o’clock. However, we have two witnesses who say they saw you walking up the cliff outside the house at half past one last night, with Mr Bray.’

I blinked. ‘I’m sorry?’

He glanced up at me. He looked awkward and embarrassed. ‘You deny being there?’

I coughed, my brain whirling. ‘Of course I deny it. I went to bed at about eleven o’clock, as I told you. They must … they must be mistaken.’

‘And your relationship with Mr Bray? It’s a – er – that is, do you get on well?’

‘Absolutely. We’re cousins and friends. At least, I’d like to think so.’ As I spoke, I realized that we were talking about him in the present tense, and wondered, with a sick feeling, whether it ought to be changed to the past. ‘Look, I don’t know why anybody would say they’d seen me talking to him, but it wasn’t me.’

‘I see.’ He folded his notebook closed. ‘I have to tell you, sir, that it is possible your cousin was not alone on the cliff edge last night; if, indeed, that is where he was.’

Words stuck in my throat. ‘Wh-wh-what do you mean?’

‘There are very faint indications that there were two people on the cliff.’ He paused. ‘A lot of the grass there has been churned up. That could be due to any number of reasons, but one of them is that there may have been some sort of a struggle.’

‘Are – are you saying …?’ But my mind did not want to grasp what he was saying.

‘It’s early days yet.’ He got to his feet and smiled at me. ‘But we’ll find out what happened to your cousin, don’t you worry.’

There was rather a menacing tone, I now realized, to his voice as he edged round the table to open the door. ‘It wasn’t me!’ I said.

‘Of course, sir,’ he said blandly, smiling with reptilian eyes, and stepped out into the hallway. As the front door closed on him, I took a breath and found there was none to be had.

I gripped the edge of the table. A vice was closed about my chest. Air. I needed air. I heard the familiar rasping sound of my throat attempting to capture oxygen. I got to my feet and knocked over the chair.

Then Scone was in the room. ‘It’s all right, sir,’ he said. ‘Sit down.’

I heard him righting the chair, and then he planted me upon it. He put a hand on my back and commanded, ‘Breathe here. One … two … three …’

Slowly, the panic subsided. My fingers relaxed their grip on the table. Breath entered my body. My lungs shuddered with their exhaustion. ‘I’m sorry,’ I croaked.

‘I wouldn’t speak if I were you.’ He disappeared momentarily; I heard him unstopping the carafe of water that sat on the sideboard. ‘Drink this.’

He put a glass in front of me. I sipped at it, returning to myself inch by inch. ‘Thank you,’ I whispered. ‘If you hadn’t come in …’

‘I heard you in the hallway. It’s that whistling sound. I know it well.’

‘Whistling?’

‘I was gassed in the war.’ He put a hand over his right lung. ‘It got in here. The other lads, they used to laugh at me, for the sound my chest made when it got bad. Like an out-of-tune whistle, they said. Used to spook them at night, apparently.’

‘I never realized you had … similar trouble,’ I said.

‘Feels as if an elephant’s sitting on your chest?’ He nodded. In Alec’s absence he seemed to have assumed some sort of second-in-command role, almost father-like. ‘It’s because of the worry over Mr Bray. I’ll tell Agnes to bring you some tea in the library.’

I allowed Scone to manoeuvre me upstairs and sit me back in the same chair.

When Agnes came with the tea she said, ‘How are you, sir? Mr Scone says you was took bad.’

‘Two witnesses …’ I began faintly, but was unable to continue. ‘Maybe he’s out there, unconscious. Lost his memory.’

‘Yes, sir.’ She put the tea tray on the rosewood coffee table beside the fireplace. ‘Maybe writing it all down will help.’

I looked up at her. ‘I’m sorry?’

She shrugged. ‘Helps me when I’m feeling out of sorts. A diary or an account or something.’

‘Oh.’ I nodded. ‘I see. Thank you.’

When she had gone I sat at the writing desk by the windows that looked over the back garden, dim in the afternoon gloom. I held the pen above the ink pot, but was unable to order the jumble of emotions into a coherent sequence of events. I stared at the blank paper, and then in a fit of anger took up the letter opener and gouged the paper into jagged squares, scoring into the blotter beneath.

‘What witnesses?’ I crunched the pieces into my fist. ‘What damn witnesses?’

My words sprang me somehow into action. I had to do something. I had to talk to somebody. I got to my feet, leaving the letter opener and the screws of paper on the desk, and walked to the open door. Immediately to my right, at an angle, was the drawing room, its own door shut tight. I raised my fist and knocked on the wood.

I heard nothing for a long time, but instinct told me she was inside. Eventually the handle gave a creak and the door opened a notch.

‘Clara.’

Her face was slivered by the gap in the door.

‘Let me in. I need to talk to you.’

‘No.’

But my foot was in the doorway, and I was stronger. Finally, she relaxed her hold and I entered the drawing room.

I had barely been inside this room since coming to Castaway; it had always been Clara’s domain, a feast of gold and blue, with her vibrant paintings hanging from the rails and a huge, listing gilt mirror over the fireplace. My aunt Viviane’s heirlooms were scattered about: statuesque women holding lamps, a studded chest with Chinese letters inscribed on its borders. I felt too masculine here; too much of an unwanted intruder.

Clara was still wearing the make-up she must have put on this morning, but her eye pencil had blotched about her face, and the bobbed set of her hair was frizzing in wild strands. She stood in the middle of the room, clutching that locket about her neck, and said, ‘What do you want?’

I spread my palms wide. ‘Just to talk.’

‘We’ve nothing to talk about.’ The whites of her eyes were scratched with red. ‘I don’t want to see you again.’

‘Clara …’

She turned away from me.

‘I’m as upset and worried about all this as you are –’ I began.

‘No, you’re not.’ She spat the words through dried, flaky lips. ‘This is exactly what you wanted, isn’t it?’

I almost laughed with the absurdity of that sentence.
‘Of course it isn’t. He’s my cousin. And my friend. I don’t want any of this.’

She turned back to me, her face screwed into a tight little ball of misery. ‘Alec is the only man …’ she began, her voice shaking. ‘The only man I have ever loved, and I treated him worse than a mangy dog.’

‘You and me,’ I said in my softest voice. ‘It has nothing to do with all this.’

She came towards me. ‘I love him! Don’t you get it, you imbecile? You were nothing to me, Robert. I only did it to … to … well, I don’t know why I did it, and now he’s gone, and there’s nothing I can do.’

She lapsed into tears; hideous, weeping sobs. I took a step towards her but she held a hand up, the other still clutching the locket, Viviane’s locket that Alec had given her, with a scrap of his hair inside. ‘Stay away from me! I swear it, I’ll scream if you touch me.’

‘I’ll give you some time,’ I murmured. ‘We’ll talk later.’

‘We’re never going to talk. I never want to see you again.’ She pointed at the door. ‘I want you to pack your things and go. Do you understand me?’

‘You don’t mean it.’

Her face transformed, gargoyle-like, and she rushed at me. ‘Get out! Get out! I never want to see you again!’

‘Clara …’ But there was no talking to her. I hurried out of the room, closing the door behind me, and heard the key turn in the lock as soon as I was gone. I backed away into the library next door, my heart beating hard, my breaths rackety and hollow. I held on to the back of the chair as tears squeezed from my eyes. I had no one to blame but myself.

I had been living a fantasy – a fantasy that Clara secretly loved me but was trapped inside a farce of a marriage, undertaken purely for financial gain. She had lied to me, yesterday in the summerhouse a hundred years ago. She was not a mercenary; or, at least, if she was, then she was one who also loved her husband.

And then I thought of the seashell I had discovered in Alec’s pocket last night, the shell Clara had found for him and etched their initials into, the shell that had not been lost at all, that had never been lost, that had instead, just as he had promised her, been kept beside his heart.

I saw it now, saw the whole truth: here were two people who loved each other dearly but had done their best to wreck all the tenderness out of their marriage. Stupid, stupid fools, but not as stupid as me for being strung along by all the spite they’d expended on each other. I remembered Lizzie’s words of yesterday, and the truth she had told about Clara and Alec and their mutual love. I recalled the way I had dismissed her own heartbreak, as if such an emotion could be overcome by force of will, and I sank to the floor, hunching myself beneath the writing desk as if the room were too large and unsafe a place for my shattered soul.

I remained there a while, the back of my head against the cold wall, and then, as if galvanized to one last action, I scrabbled my hand upwards on to the desk, retrieved the letter opener and began gouging into the wooden underside of the windowsill.

The work took me some time, and calmed me, in an odd sort of way. At that moment, it seemed as if it was of the utmost importance that I finish the task, and that I could do nothing else until it was completed.

After the letters had been etched, I was still not satisfied, and so I retrieved the ink pot and pen from the desk and, as if I were a master craftsman, began a careful blacking in of my work. It was tricky going: ink dribbled on to my face and my hands, spotted my suit and the floorboards, but I knew that none of this was important; creation was the thing, and this was far more vital than a watercolour of a lake or a sketch of a gull on the crest of a wave.

Finally, it was done. I raised my weary eyelids one last time to take in my art:

And then slumped, exhausted, against the wall, dropping pen and pot to the floor and closing my eyes.

Immediately, I fell asleep and dreamed of Clara standing on the peak of a giant, pallid skeleton of a diplodocus. Beside me was Alec, who took my hand and with his other pointed upwards. ‘Look away, Robert,’ he said. ‘She’s going to jump off.’